


Kissing the Fang

by t_pock



Series: Beasts of the Earth According to Their Kinds [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Hallucinations, M/M, Season One Divergence, Snakes, Will Knows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 06:59:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3125276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_pock/pseuds/t_pock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will gets sick and discovers he can't keep Hannibal's secret anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kissing the Fang

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go again! I was foolish enough to let myself be talked into a sequel, and so far I've come very close to regretting it - but at the end of the day I couldn't keep myself from revisiting this 'verse.
> 
> So this is take two, with a welcome back to the bloody dog and a hello to trite religious imagery that happened to serve my persistent animalism theme (my lord, I found a niche). Please, as always, enjoy!
> 
> Special thanks to my kittygirl, who has encouraged me and listened to me whine for the past half-year.
> 
> Title and chapter titles from a poem of the same name.

It’s dusk, and the very last of the sun glows behind the hard slate clouds like light breaking through cracks in stone. Will squats on his porch steps and shivers in his parka and hat, watching his dogs play through the fog of his breath. The cold eats him slowly, starting at his extremities and biting through his clothing; he resists the urge to rub at his goosebumps and lets himself be consumed.

The snow is ankle-high in his yard, dimpled with the paw prints his dogs leave behind as they chase the toys Will throws for them. Angus trips over Buster and Gizmo on the way to intercept a ball, and Winston and Dakota tug on their favorite rope. Toast looks back and smiles at him around his lolling tongue; Rusty barks once.

The bloody dog lies on the porch at Will’s back.

The fragrance of pine makes the air pungent. Will’s mouth is silty with the dregs of crappy supermarket hot chocolate and his belly is buzzing with the equally cheap tequila he poured in it. It’s been about an hour since he finished his mug and he’s drowsy from the drink and the hour.

He pauses his throwing to rub at his heavy eyelids; his hands smell like dog spit. There’s a fatigue headache pulsing at his temples and ringing in his ears. It makes his forehead and cheeks feel hot in spite of the chill—he takes off his beanie and flings it aside before carrying on the game of fetch. His sweaty hair stiffens immediately in the cold and the crisp air pricks his scalp like needles. He feels marginally better.

It was a long day at the Academy, spent wrestling with pre-semester stress after a too-short holiday. He’s ready for his sheets. In a few minutes he’ll put a halt to the fun and games and usher his pack inside. He’s going to take an early night tonight—pour himself another two fingers to ease the throb in his head and send him to bed. Hopefully sleep will drain the pressure from his skull.

Something cracks in the woods fencing his lawn and Angus swings around to woof at the sound. Will keeps throwing, undeterred—the trees have been creaking since the weather changed, splintering from the frost and groaning under the weight of the icicles hanging like chimes from their boughs. Buster leaps into the air to snap up the ball, but something cracks again and Winston drops the rope. Dakota follows his lead and turns to stare after the noise. At the third crack all of the dogs stop and look.

Will follows their collective gaze. Twilight seals up the fissures in the clouds and the ensuing darkness makes it hard to see through the black tangle of brambles and trees. At first the woods look like one gnarled mass, a Gordian knot he can’t untangle from his vantage point on the top stair. Slowly the gloom resolves into a tunnel of branches and bushes, carpeted with fuzzy stitchwort and hedged with withered rootstocks of gamagrass.

Angus woofs again. A shadow inside the tunnel moves.

The porch bulb clicks on and Will flinches. Everything outside the orange circle of light becomes indiscernible.

A hot puff of breath against the nape of his neck alerts him to the bloody dog sniffing at his hair, thin ice crystalizing on the damp ends. Will shivers and jerks away, twisting to look over his shoulder. The bloody dog looks back.

Unnerved, Will rises to his feet, crunching across the snow to gather up all the toys and herd his pack up the stairs with a distracted _everybody in_. The dogs obey, jumping over the bloody dog where it lies in the center of the porch. It rolls upright as Will passes and walks him through the front door.

Briefly Will glances back across the yard. A few mote-sized snowflakes drift down from the iron-bellied clouds like ash, but everything else is still. He closes the door and flips off the porch light.

The darkness rushes in.

=

Jack and Will stand on opposite sides of the corridor outside Bowman’s cramped office, nursing coffees out of styrofoam. They arrived in Quantico not an hour ago, back from New Jersey with evidence linking a corner store manager to three mummified bodies found by teenagers exploring a rundown duplex in Camden. Will’s been awake since 4:30 this morning; Jack has likely been awake longer.

Bowman’s working on their findings now, deciphering what appears to be encoded notes on the back of a printed receipt strip. Will can hear them through the half-open door chanting their peculiar mantra, a deep reprise of _you’re so sly, but so am I_ that blurs together after the twentieth repetition.

Jack glances impatiently at his watch—Bowman’s one of the best, however, and he hardly ever raises his voice to them. He resettles on the wall instead and drains the last of his coffee. Will holds a hand out automatically.

Jack passes him the empty cup. “Thanks.”

Will slides it under his own. “Sure.”

“The second Bowman’s done, we’re out of here,” Jack says, pulling out his phone. “Berger has seven hours on us and the window for cutting him off is closing.”

“We’ll make it,” Will says quietly, but Jack is already talking.

Will looks at him. His face is pinched with tension and his shoulders are raised like he’s trying to stand up under a suit of armor. The rings like bruises under his eyes hint at a restless night worrying after Bella. There’s a soda stain on his suit pants where a flight attendant spilled on him; he was perfectly gracious about it but Will can tell the stickiness is prodding his frustration like a poker sticking a bull.

Words start to climb the back of Will’s throat. They drill up through his molars and pry out of his gums, gathering on his tongue and fizzling there like carbonation. Will is afraid to open his mouth, for fear they’ll bubble over and pour out.

Jack is engrossed in whatever he’s telling to the person on the other end of the call—Cooke or Duarte, if Will had to guess—but Will knows he’d drop the phone in a heartbeat if Will blurted what he knew.

Will thinks about it.

He’s seen Jack countless times over the past month, however, and every one of those times he’s kept his lips shut. He knows he won’t say a word.

Bowman leans out of their office, small and formal in their bow tie and big glasses. They hold out the resealed receipt and a sheet of cleanly scribbled notes. “Got him. Four addresses here, three of them in New Jersey—two are crime scenes we’ve worked and the third is probably one nobody’s stumbled upon yet. The fourth address is in Arizona. My guess is some sort of rendezvous point.”

Jack tears himself away from the call. “Good work,” he says tersely, pocketing the papers. He points at Will. “Tell Beverly to suit up. I want her on a trigger when we hit this guy.”

Will lobs their cups in the trash and nods. He digs his phone out of his pocket and follows Jack out of the Bureau.

=

The sun is pallid overhead, the low stratum of snow clouds in the sky chilling its light to white. Will tucks his fishing rod between his knees so he can reach up and snatch his beanie off of his head, baring his sweaty forehead to the brisk morning air. His cheap folding chair creaks under him, squatting crooked on top of the uneven ground beside the small pond he’s dipping a lure into. He drops the hat into the open lid of his tackle box and takes up the rod again, chair protesting as he gets comfortable now that he’s no longer overheated.

The pond is blue-black with cold and utterly still, and his line disappears an inch below the surface. Ice leeches from the stark-white snow beside the water and crowds the edges with a fringe of frost like tufts of lace. Nothing stirs, but Will hadn’t banked on catching anything anyway. Though the water has yet to freeze over completely, any fish left will be huddling all the way at the bottom, lethargic and hard to tease. It’s not a problem—the feeling of the rod in his hand is enough.

He’s never tried to fish here before. He’s only known about this place for a few weeks; he hadn’t been sure he could find it again when he stepped out of his door with the chair under one arm and his gear under the other, especially since the snow has blotted out some of the landmarks he uses to navigate the forest. He recognized it when he saw it, however—the memories of washing his feet in the icy water and gorging on the plant life at its rim are still vivid in his mind.

This is the first time he’s ventured into the woods since then. His dogs are circling some of the nearby trees and sniffing at old squirrel tracks, probably glad to be beyond the confines of the yard. Will thinks he’s glad to be out too, even if he finds his attention flitting to every noise that echoes in the white silence of the forest around them.

He stays there on the lip of the pond, keeping his body warm and his mind numb with draughts from a flask, until his packs starts looking a little sluggish, Gizmo shaking like a leaf and Rusty rumbling out his hunger. Then he packs up his things and leads the way back home, unable to keep himself from looking over his shoulder as they walk.

Along the way Angus stops to poke his muzzle into a hole in the ground. The snow on the forest floor is thinner than the snow in his yard; the bristly pine canopy catches most of it before it touches the ground. At a glance Will can see that the hole is deep and goes back far.

Will hauls Angus away so he can inspect it—it looks like a former rodent burrow, one that’s long been depopulated and taken over by a snake. In different weather there might have been a nasty surprise waiting coiled in there for him. There’s no sign of any life in there now.

Sinking down on one knee, Will gathers his dogs around him and tells them individually to be careful where they stick their noses. He repeats the command to Angus and Rusty twice. The moment he lets them go they all start bounding back the way they came, enthused by his promise of lunch. He watches them go with a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

A sudden crack snaps his head back toward the hole. The bloody dog is sitting on its haunches beside it. Will startles a little; he hadn’t noticed it following them here. Pelt steaming in the frigid air, it stares him down soundlessly with its peculiar empty gaze.

Will stares back until the effort overwhelms him and leaves his skin crawling. Then he tells it, “Hurry up, or there won’t be any kibble left.”

The bloody dog doesn’t move for a long time. Will feels snow soaking through the fabric of his pants where he kneels. Just when he shifts to climb back to his feet, the bloody dog stands and trots after the pack toward the farmhouse.

Will watches it go. When he can no longer see any of his dogs through the underbrush, he bends down to retrieve his gear and fold his chair under his arm again. The impulse to glance back at the hole tingles at the nape of his neck. He ignores it. 

He makes his way home alone.

=

There’s a teaching seminar being held in D.C. in the evening. In order to catch it Will consolidates his morning and afternoon classes into one optional lecture about various areas of forensic expertise. It’s the first week of class which means schedules are still settling—he keeps the lecture short and generic.

For the first half of the class he discusses a case in which an optometrist matched the air space flaws and lamination wear in pictures of a suspect’s glasses to spectacles found beneath a body in Ontario. His own glasses have slid down, the bridge slick from his perspiration; he pushes them back up with his free hand so the top frame blocks his eyes once more, fingers dropping down to resume tapping at his thigh.

The webbing between his thumb and forefinger is curiously dry. Will scratches at it as he clicks through his slides with his laser remote. He describes the testimony of an astronomer whose calculations about the shadow cast by a new house at night facilitated the investigation of a man murdering husbands according to the lunar calendar. The itch persists; he scratches harder.

After the lecture, he takes a seat behind the bulwark of his desk and endures the three students that come down to ask him questions about the format of his class. In his lap he worries the skin on his hand with his nails.

“Will you post your presentations online?” the last student asks him, only a head taller than the desk. He can guess her type—frequent emailer, aggressive participator, extra credit devotee.  She reminds him intensely of a student from last semester—the student who has answered every one of his prompts, the only one he’s ever given a perfect score. The author of the Ripper paper.

He lifts his eyes to her nose. “Sure,” he says, “but without my notes. You’ll have your own from class.”

“Understood,” she nods. “Thank you, professor.”

He gives an uncomfortable shrug and she leaves, joining up with her friends at the door and disappearing down the corridor. He’s left by himself in his classroom.

At length he realizes that he’s still scratching. When he looks down at his hand, all the skin from his wrist to his knuckles is red and raw.

=

The night is purpling to black when Will starts getting ready for bed. He pads barefoot into the kitchen to switch on his new automatic brewer, ladling ground coffee into the filter and setting the timer. He fumbles with the buttons; it was a gift. When that’s done, he goes around gathering his dogs from where they’re dispersed across the house, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, and shoos them into the living room. He avoids the mirror as he rinses his face. Then he makes a second sweep, switching off lights and checking the windows and doors.

When he finally gets into bed, stacking two towels on his nightstand preemptively, he’s less tired than when he came home. He clicks off his bedside lamp anyway.

For a moment everything is dark as pitch. Slowly his eyes adjust to the hushed light outside the windows, the muted reflection of the moon on the snow. It casts a peppermint glow in his living room, glinting off the soft pelts of his pack near the fireplace, twinkling on the magnifying glass next to his lures. He closes his eyes and tugs the sheets up over his head.

For an hour and a half Will lies there in the humid tent of his blankets trying to turn off his brain. He listens to his dogs’ breathing in the dark, seven different snores and one quiet cycle of exhales. The glow outside brightens as the moon passes its peak, penetrating his sheets to glitter in his eyes. Gradually it tames his erratic thoughts into white noise; he goes limp on his boxy mattress.

Will spends half the night like that, in an open-eyed stupor that resembles sleep closely enough that he feels groggy and confused when he jerks out of it.

At first he has no idea why he’s awake. He bails himself out of the blankets and glances at his bedside clock, finding it barely past 3:00 in the morning, a silent hour. Blearily he blinks and turns onto his back, flinging an arm across his sweaty forehead.

Directly above him, the ceiling creaks. 

Will stiffens. Then he relaxes. His little house is old; it makes all manner of noises as it settles on its haunches. He snatches up a towel to put under his damp head and rolls himself back up in his sheets. He shuts his eyes.

The creaking shifts to the right. Will sits up.

He strains his ears to listen. Outside there’s the occasional, muffled crunch of snow falling from the gutter. Ten feet away is the quiet scratch of Buster clawing his floorboards as he runs through his dreams. 

The creaking comes again, this time in a march across the ceiling like footsteps.

Will realizes that his pulse is picking up and his skin is prickling with goosebumps. He gets as far as tearing the sheets back and swinging his legs over the side of the bed before he makes himself stop. “It’s nothing,” he tries to say out loud, but it comes out as a croak.

He looks over at his dogs. None of them have reacted to the noise. Will finds the shape of the bloody dog in the deep shadow cast by the hearth; it’s still sleeping. 

Some of the tension bleeds out of him. He lies back down on the bed, stiff as a board. After a moment he reaches down to pull the sheets back up to his chin. He tries to go to sleep but the moon has moved and there’s no more glitter.

His eyes don’t close until sunrise.

=

Will comes awake with a gasp, his lungs seizing and his breath leaving his open mouth in a plume of steam. Under his feet the shingles of his roof are grainy and rough, slippery with ice in places and cold enough to make his soles feel numb. A gust of air pierces his sweaty t-shirt and underwear; his knees knock and his teeth chatter so hard he bites his tongue. At his back Winston and Angus are barking from one of the upstairs window. Will is fifteen feet above the ground and he has no idea how he got there.

He glances down. There’s a dead bird in his hands.

“Graham?”

Down below, Donavan looks up at him from the middle of his yard, bundled up to the nose in a parka and scarf. Will’s only heard his voice twice ever; it’s rusty from disuse but it carries in the muffled wintry quiet. In his gloved hands is a picnic basket, one of the kind he and Pratishta make to put their gifts in. Will has a stack of them in his laundry room—Pratishta weaves the baskets and Donavan staples quilt cloth to the insides. From experience Will extrapolates that there’s a pie or a cobbler inside.

“Yeah?” Will answers, just as hoarse, his lips stiff and hard to work. It’s so cold he has a headache.

Donavan puts his arm through the handle of the basket so he can sign to Will, Y _ou okay?_  

Will nods jerkily.

Donavan gives him an indecipherable look. He pinches his fingers together. _What are you doing?_  

Will has no idea how to answer that. He drops his eyes—his skin looks like wax paper, filmy and thin, his veins visible and dark as pond water. He’s still clutching the bird, a chickadee; it’s cold and rigid, and the tickle of its cream belly feathers in his cracked palms makes nausea churn in his stomach.

“I was—” he breathes, groping for an explanation. “I saw the bird. I was trying to help the bird.”

Donavan stares at him before crunching across the snow to Will’s porch, disappearing under the awning. Will hears him set the basket down on the steps before he backs up until Will can see him again, holding out his hands.

Will uncurls his arms, the fine hairs there pulling as the motion shatters the tiny ice crystals of his frozen sweat. He forces his fingers open and lets the bird fall into Donavan’s gloves.

Donavan catches it and tosses it across the field on the other side of Will’s driveway. Then he points with both hands. _Go inside_.

Will goes. He pries his feet up where they’ve been welded to the roof with ice, hissing as he loses skin, limping toward the open window where Winston and Angus are still barking. They back up to let him in and then the entirety of his pack is crowding him, licking at his cold fingers and pressing their bodies against his shaking legs. The heat of them is almost painful.

He stumbles down the stairs with them in tow, opening the front door to let Donavan in. They go immediately to the kitchen, where Will soaps his hands over and over again while Donavan double-bags his gloves and grabs a cloth to clean Will’s doorknob for him. He helps Will into the living room and sits him down in front of the space heater, whisking his blankets off the bed and making him a cocoon.

He twists his fingers. _Are you hurt?_

Will shakes his head. He’s trembling violently now; the clicking of his teeth is audible. He manages to wave his hand away from his chin. _Thank you_.

One corner of Donavan’s mouth twitches; it’s his approximation of a smile. He goes back into Will’s kitchen to rifle around in the cabinets; Will hears dishes clinking before Donavan returns with plates and forks and a knife.

They’ve done this a few times. Will is pretty sure Pratishta thinks he doesn’t eat—she’s been sending Donavan along with more and more goodies, to the point that one day Will felt bad enough about him making the constant trek that he invited him in to partake. It’s not a big production, usually just Donavan obligingly sharing the food and silence with him before leaving with as little fanfare with which he arrived.

Donavan is as unassuming as ever. He waits until Will’s fingers have thawed and hands him a precise isosceles slice of blackberry cobbler, the lattice-crust top intact.

They don’t say or sign anything as they eat. Toast whines as he burrows into Will’s cocoon to put his muzzle on Will’s thigh, but it’s otherwise quiet. Rusty sidles up to Donavan. The rest of the pack is curled up behind Will. The bloody dog isn’t in the room.

When they finish Donavan takes the dishes away. Will hears the brief gurgle of the kitchen tap before Donavan returns, toting the basket.

He looks uncertain. His fingers twitch at his sides as he tries to decide how to articulate the frown furrowing his brow. Eventually he simply asks, Y _ou sure you’re okay?_

Will feels the ghost sensation of bird feathers slipping through his fingers. He’s not sure. “Yes.”

Donavan’s face is unreadable. He puts the basket in one of Will’s armchairs and stomps back into his boots, waiting until Will’s looking before he splays his fingers and taps his right hand on his left. _Be careful_.

It occurs to Will that the admonishment covers a multitude of meanings. “I will,” he promises.

Donavan gives him a look. Then he inclines his head simply and lets himself out, motioning for Will to stay in front of the space heater. Will’s goodbye gets bitten off between his chattering teeth.

He waits until he can no longer see Donavan trudging away through his big front windows before he lets out a loud, “Goddamnit.”

The dogs startle, a few of them putting their bellies on the ground even though it’s not a command. Will drops his face into his hands, rubbing at his eyes until phosphenes dot his vision like stars. He takes a moment to fully appreciate the fact that his neighbor just found him on his roof in his underwear.

He tries hard to remember getting out of bed and moving through his house, but he can’t. He tries harder to remember if the chickadee was dead when he grabbed it. He doesn’t think it was.

He flinches when he feels the bloody dog’s cold nose on his wrist, pushing it off instinctively. Its whole pelt is cold, though he knows he didn’t let it outside or let it back in. Toast scrambles out of the way as it shoves back and dips its head to lick Will’s palms.

Will snatches his hands away. “No.” 

The bloody dog puts one big paw on Will’s thigh where Toast was.

“I said no.”

It fixes him with its empty stare.

Will holds out for a while, until his shivers stop and the ache in his jaw from his chattering teeth fades. The bloody dog doesn’t look away. At length Will sighs, tired of the dog and tired of himself. Reluctantly he holds his hands back out.

The bloody dog licks them until the soap residue is gone and it can taste what’s underneath.

=

There’s a Baga snake in Hannibal’s office.

Will sits perched on the bottom rung of the ladder to the mezzanine, his left knee brushing the candy cane drapes of one of the twin windows facing the next building over. It’s unusually hot in the room—his hat and jacket are flung across the chaise lounge with his bag, and he’s undone the top buttons of his shirt to cool the sweat pooling at his collarbones. The chill bleeds through the window pane and soothes him a little, but he’s not looking outside.

He’s looking at the snake.

The sculpture stands between the panes, as tall as Will and made of wood carved so sinuously it looks like it’s slithering up the wall. Browns, reds and whites zigzag down the snake in diamonds, and the eyes in the broad flat face at the top are big and opaque. It looks dangerous.

Hannibal stands directly in front of it. He’s wearing his sable suit with red windowpane, the one that looks like it’s been embroidered with thread the color of a wound. His mouth is dark with the wine he poured for them. He’s staring directly into the snake’s eyes. He looks dangerous.

The sculpture is from the Baga people of the coastal lagoons of Guinea—Hannibal told Will about it last week during the wait for it to be installed in his office. It’s actually a headcrest, ceremonially mounted on the shoulders of a dancer, totemically representative of the snake spirit in command of the rivers and the rains. It’s fearsome and powerful, and Hannibal gives it a predator’s reverence as he drops his gaze to admire its serpentine curves.

For a moment Will can’t tell them apart.

He begins to sweat again.

Hannibal’s nostrils flare. He turns to look at Will, and his red eyes appear slitted in the dim light of his desk lamp.

Will tenses up. He can smell himself now too, pungent and briny. His curls are stuck wetly to his forehead, and sweat clumps his eyelashes together. He blinks it away to keep his vision clear, to keep Hannibal in sight.

Neither one of them have spoken yet, though Will’s hour is almost up. Hannibal opened the waiting room door at 7:30 precisely, as per usual, but when he ushered Will inside it was wordlessly and with a familiar firm hand on the back of his neck. The moment Hannibal let go Will tore out of his coat to bare his fevered skin to the air, but with Hannibal’s attention on him again it’s not enough.

Hannibal is almost seven feet away. His hands are in his pockets and the line of his spine is relaxed. Nevertheless the hairs on the back of Will’s neck lift.

He startles when Hannibal moves toward him without warning. His tread is light across the floorboards; he doesn’t bother making his footsteps audible as he closes the distance between them. He comes to stand between Will’s spread legs before hiking up the fabric of his plaid pants and kneeling.

His dark mouth is level with Will’s heart. Suddenly Will’s ribcage feels like poor protection.

Hannibal reaches for him and Will flinches. His hand is surprisingly cool when he brushes Will’s soaked curls back and wipes the sheen from his face. He opens a few more buttons on Will’s shirt and fans him until the sweat stops popping up on his forehead.

Then he reaches down to lace Will’s fingers with his own. Only in Hannibal’s steady hands does Will realizes that his are shaking.

=

The Bureau’s indoor shooting range is almost full when Will arrives. He picks up ammunition from the desk in the foyer and heads to the first of the three ranges, the 50-foot short range. It has seven lanes, five of which are occupied by four other agents and one trainee. Will takes the lane closest to the door leading to the shotgun range, juggling the ammo and his eye gear and his target. He thinks the trainee might be waving at him—one of his students—but he keeps his head down until he reaches his booth.

It’s been a while since he’s been here. He was reminded of that when he and Jack got stuck in a shootout at the Sky Harbor in Phoenix, trailing the SWAT team against procedure under the bellies of airplanes and taking cover behind the luggage trucks. The perps were associates of the store owner from Camden; they were prepared. One of them managed to duck under the crossfire and advance on Jack’s cover. 

Will fired five shots but Beverly took him down. That’s not good enough for the field.

He adjusts his earmuffs, making sure the thunder of gunshots is sufficiently muffled, and slides on the eyewear. He doesn’t look at the target as he pins it up and hits the button beneath the bench to move it back 30 feet—he can still see it in the corner of his eye, however, and the faceless silhouette has already morphed into his persistent ghost.

He loads his gun and takes aim.

The first shot hits Garrett Jacob Hobbs in the arm.

It’s not the first time Will has seen him here; it’s not likely to be the last. Hobbs’ eternal sneer is visible across the distance between them, somewhere between mocking and ravenous. Will empties a clip into his chest.

By the time he pauses to take a break, shoulder aching and fingers cramping, most of the other shooters have gone. Will is panting a little and the armpits of his shirt are damp, but he feels just as tightly-wound as he did when he came in. He lowers the gun and surveys his work.

Hobbs is riddled with holes. Antler tines have sprouted in all the gunshot wounds; he’s bristling with them, the velvet on the horns matted with his blood. Will managed serendipitously to put a bullet through his eye—the tine that protrudes from the socket spirals up to a deadly point. Hobbs is still sneering.

Will reloads his gun with the one magazine he has left and aims at Hobbs’ face. 

He braces himself for the shout of the shot, powerful even with the protective gear, but right before he pulls the trigger he hears a noise. He pauses, cocking his head. The noise comes again: a squeak, like the scuff of a shoe on linoleum. He hears it again and again until the sound becomes the cadence of footsteps headed his way.

That’s when he remembers he’s still wearing the earmuffs.

He snatches them off. It’s quiet in the range, almost peculiarly so after the collective barrage of gunfire from before—he realizes that he’s completely alone. He sets the gear down on the bench and steps back to look down the line of lanes. There’s no one there.

Will’s throat constricts. He spares one look at Hobbs where he hangs like a bled pig before he gathers his things and leaves.

=

Will has a pack of sterile wipes in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant spray in the other. Even through the two pairs of gloves he snapped on, the cleaning chemicals he’s been wiping the morgue down with for the past half-hour are stinging his hands. The enclosed aroma of ammonia has completely razed his nose hairs and he has the beginnings of a headache. He thinks about taking a break but the cleaning’s almost done and it makes more sense to finish wiping down the metal cots and be done with it.

Across the room Beverly is depositing soiled modesty sheets into a bin. She makes a face as they slop wetly to the bottom.

Will tells her, “Please don’t ever ask me for a favor again.”

Her grimace melts into a leer. “So you’re having fun,” she says. “I’m glad. This is my favorite part of the day too.”

They finish shortly. It takes Beverly longer to strip off her gloves—the cast on her left wrist foils her repeatedly. Will helps her untangle herself from her lab coat and then they turn off all but one light for the janitor who’ll come in later to mop the floors.

They pass Jack on the way out of the building. He looks like he’s thinking about stopping them but Beverly is quick to lean on Will and hold her wrist with exaggerated gingerness. Jack gives them a curt nod and keeps walking.

Will ends up escorting Beverly all the way to her Prius, their shoes kicking up some of the dirty slush clumped in dingy wet piles on the edges of the parking lot. Will’s eyebrows go up when she links their arms together and huddles close to him.

“You’re really warm,” she explains.

“Glad to be of service,” Will says dryly.

She reaches up to pull his beanie down over his eyes. He doesn’t retaliate because she’s wearing heels and the asphalt is slippery, but he assures her, “I’ll remember this.”

“You don’t scare me, little man,” she scoffs.

“I’m not above tattling,” Will warns her.

She leers at him. “And what’s Lecter gonna do?”

Will blinks. That…wasn’t what he meant at all.

Beverly doesn’t miss his sudden derailment. She asks, “You guys are still doing it, right?”

Will gives her an unimpressed look.

She shrugs.

As they walk, he thinks back to last Friday, to Hannibal’s grip on his vulnerable neck and the way Hannibal held his hands until the trembling abated. He thinks back to the arch of the Baga snake directly behind Hannibal, and how in the lamplight their dark eyes matched.

Once again Will feels words marching up his throat, creeping down his tongue like a procession of ants. They beat against his teeth like moth wings against a light, intent on escape. Will thinks about what Beverly would do if he let them—if she would turn around and run back to the building, heels be damned.

He opens his mouth.

“He bites,” is what he says.

Beverly’s head whips around. “What?”

Mortification flushes Will to the point of radiance. He almost wishes he’d spat out the other words instead. “Dr. Lecter bites,” he repeats. Between the cold and all the blood in his face, he’s certain that he’s bright pink.

Beverly looks like she’s won the lottery. Will wonders how far that information will spread in the next twenty-four hours.

“That’s…very educational,” she says. “Never would have guessed, looking at him.” Will can feel her rising glee like vibrations through the point of contact where their arms are entwined. She adds, grin cutting, “Those suits are _really_ misleading.”

Will looks away. “Yeah, they are.”

=

Will stands in the doorway of his upstairs bedroom and takes stock. The knob on the outside of the door is busted and there’s a hole in the wall where the inside knob punched through the plaster. There are filthy footprints right at the door, speckled with droplets of brown-dried blood, and a lighter trail of prints leading from the threshold to the bed. The things on the nightstand have been knocked askew. The room is a wreck, and it has been for a while.

He takes a step inside and is met with the smell of stale sex.

He takes a step back out.

He’ll need to clean it up eventually. He’ll need to throw out the mattress, since it’s old and stained with sweat, dirt, and semen. He’ll need to find his discarded bottle of lube and make sure it hasn’t emptied out somewhere under the bed. He’ll need to fix the cracks in the wall, chinks banged into the plaster by the short headboard. He’ll need to find the ripped pieces of his underwear. 

Eventually.

For now he grabs the faulty knob and closes the door as best as he can. He’s sweating again and his palms are clammy; he waits until his burgeoning erection wilts before turning around and going for the stairs.

Something creaks overhead.

He halts halfway down the hall, glancing up at the ceiling. Dangling above him is the cord to his attic space. He stands motionless underneath it for the span of a few heartbeats, listening. He hears nothing else.

He grabs the cord.

Dust shakes loose as he pulls down the attic door, making him sneeze. The gears on the door shriek in protest; Will reminds himself to check them out when he takes a look at the door to the linen closet. He unfolds the ladder without much effort, though he pulls apart some spiderwebs in the process. It settles into the grooves worn into the floorboards long before he moved in. Above him, the attic is in shadow.

Will goes downstairs briefly to rifle through his kitchen drawers for a flashlight. Dakota looks up curiously from where she’s dragged her bed over by the back door, and follows him when he returns to the attic with a skinny hand light in his fist. Her wagging tail sweeps the dust from the floor as she lies down beneath the ladder and watches him.

He clicks the flashlight on and points it upward. Through the square hole leading into the attic he can see the ribs of his roof. He reaches up to wave a few stray webs away, puts the light between his teeth, and starts climbing.

The attic space is small and little used. Will has never put anything up there, since he keeps what he needs either downstairs or in the shed. He’s only seen it once—when he bought the house—and even then he knew he wouldn’t use it. It’s only three feet high and carpeted with pale pink insulation, not worth the effort.

He stops on the fifth rung, head and shoulders into the attic. He takes the flashlight out of his mouth and swings it around, illuminating the small space. It looks much like he expected it to: curtained with more cobwebs and littered with tiny fecal pellets. Relief pushes the tension out of him on a sigh—it’s mice.

Just as he’s about to climb back down and see what traps he has in the house, he catches a second glimpse of the pellets and frowns.

They’re all stale. 

Confusion replaces relief. Will shines the flashlight on the sullied insulation, pink molded to brown under the shit, and sees something draped across the fiberglass. He has to stretch to reach it—he manages to pinch it between two fingers and pluck it off the floor. It uncoils as he lifts it, tearing when he pulls it toward him too fast.

He holds it up to the light.

It’s a piece of snake skin.

Will stares. Then he tosses the skin away, puts the flashlight back between his teeth, and climbs back down to the floor. Dakota perks up when he folds the ladder and gets on tiptoes to push the attic door closed, and she follows him back to the kitchen where he washes his hands and puts the light back.

He dries his hands slowly and tries to think. Dakota nudges his knee and whines. Will obeys the impulse to bend down and take her in his arms; she tucks her muzzle into his armpit. He attempts to picture the snake that shed the skin he found.

He hugs her tighter to him.

=

Will doesn’t like the look Jack is giving him.

“I just want to supplement what you’ve told me,” Jack says. His palms are outstretched in that placating way that indicates he knows Will is about to spook and he’s prepared to gentle him. He leans back in his chair to maximize the space between them, making the desk neutral ground so Will, presumably, won’t bolt.

Will tilts his head so that his glasses slide down, rebellious in advance. “Then why does this feel like an interrogation?”

“It’s not,” Jack says firmly, but he still has a look on his face like he’s about to get to the bottom of something.

“Who’s supplementing?” Will asks, right as the door to Jack’s office opens.

The smell of tasteful cologne arrives at the desk before Hannibal does. He pulls out the chair next to Will and sits down in a rustle of fabric, pausing long enough to shake Jack’s hand.

“Hello, Jack,” he greets. “Hello, Will.”

Will doesn’t look at him. “Dr. Lecter.”

“Doctor,” Jack says with warmth. For a moment Will is surprised, but flashes like tongues of flame of Hannibal and Jack sharing bourbon and conversation in front of Hannibal’s hearth lick his mind. Jack’s voice is much sterner when he says, “Glad you could make it. I need your help.”

“It is yours,” Hannibal replies. “What can I do for you?”

Will gets to his feet and puts some distance between him and them, going over to stand in front of the case on the far wall displaying a handful of Jack’s various degrees and awards. There’s a picture, more than a few years old, of Jack shaking the hand of the former Bureau director; in it, his hair has already grayed to salt and pepper, though there’s a lot more of it than there is now. 

Jack pauses before speaking. “You’ve heard of the recent abductions and mutilations of minors in the Midwest?”

There’s an incredible current of distaste in Hannibal’s voice. “The child killer. I have heard.”

Jack continues, “Will has sketched a profile.” Will’s jaw works at the word _sketched;_ he shifts his attention to the boxing trophy, somehow not incongruous in the midst of the rest of the accolades, in the corner of Jack’s display. “The nature of the crimes makes them particularly heinous. I don’t want Will to get burnt out.” Will’s snort goes mostly unnoticed. “I’d like to get another viewpoint.”

Hannibal makes a thoughtful noise. “Will’s intuition is very powerful,” he says. “I don’t anticipate being able to offer much beyond what he’s already given you, though I’m happy to try.”

Will makes an effort to believe that Hannibal is practicing his usual exaggerated flattery; there’s enough veiled egoism there that he nearly succeeds, but there’s also enough sincerity in the sentiment that the back of his neck heats traitorously. He turns back to them.

Surprise makes him bite his cheek, and blood fills his mouth.

Hannibal looks like a demon. His skin is dark as tar, slick like oil under the office fluorescents, and from the back of his head protrude antlers like a black broken halo. He’s still wearing the beige sweater and slacks he walked in wearing, but his eyes are milky like those of a corpse and his hands end in talons. His mouth doesn’t move, though Will can still hear his voice, and he’s pointing at Jack, piercing Jack’s chest from across the desk with one long nail the color of rot. 

Jack nods. “Thank you, doctor.” Something poisonous bubbles from the wound and dribbles down the front of his suit.

The antler tines slice through the air as Hannibal inclines his head. “My pleasure.”

Will wipes his mouth where blood starts to fleck the corners and goes over to quietly retake his seat. He doesn’t realize he’s sweating until Hannibal asks him, “Are you well, Will?”

Will realizes he must be broadcasting pheromones again, expelling acrid fear from his pores. “I’m fine,” he says stiffly, looking straight down.

He startles when he feels Hannibal’s hand carding through his bangs to feel the temperature of his forehead, but he allows it. Hannibal withdraws his touch and announces, “You’re a little warm. I recommend you find yourself a drink of water.”

Will takes a risk and looks over. Hannibal’s eyes are matte and impenetrable, their normal red; his skin is no longer inky. He’s looking at Will with concern but something in the lines around his mouth makes him look hungry too.

Will presses a hand to his own forehead; he can’t tell the difference. He chances a glance at Jack and finds him observing him and Hannibal with the scrutiny of a hawk—abruptly Will realizes what this is all about. 

Frowning, he uses the corner of Jack’s desk to get to his feet and excuses himself, muttering, “I’m going to find a vending machine.”

“Head home if you’re feeling under the weather,” Jack suggests, in the voice he uses with witnesses and interviewees when he’s gotten the information out of them that he wanted.

Will bites down on his first impulsive response to that, and his second. He nods with grit teeth, gathers his things, and leaves Hannibal and Jack sitting opposite the big desk like kings in counsel.

He looks back at them as he passes through the glass door. Though Hannibal appears the same, Jack’s shirt starts seeping poison again.

Will turns away.

=

It’s bright outside, the sky so pale as to be indistinguishable from the ground, the snow fiercely white under the pallid sun. Will squints through the glare of it as he circles his little house, inspecting the foundation and the eaves of its flank. His eyes linger critically on the wire conduits and pipe outlets, on the crook where the roof joins the house.

He’s checking for holes.

Usually that’s a spring chore—after the ice recedes and his little house swells in the warm weather, he’ll go around putting mesh in drains and plugging up crawl spaces to keep critters from entering through breaches in the walls. He can’t recall ever doing it at the onset of winter, but the snake skin in the attic has been on his mind. He doesn’t want something in the house with his dogs.

They’re out with him now, doing their version of helping. Angus makes his own, wider circle, pissing on the fringes of Will’s yard. Buster dashes tunnels through the drift piling up against the shrubbery to the east, and Gizmo teeters on hind legs underneath one of the backyard trees, sucking on a low-hanging icicle. The rest of them are in the front. Will cocks his head, listening for a moment to make sure his pack is all accounted for, before crouching down to look closer at the crawl space beneath the house.

There’s a crack in the door.

Will regards it grimly. It’s no bigger than a coin at its widest, but if a critter can fit its head through, the rest of it is coming in too. He doubts that’s how the attic snake got in—there’s probably a crack higher up next to the tree by his house that needs his attention—but he might as well fix this one first.

His knees pop as he straightens, turning around to stomp through the snow over to his shed where his tools are. Buster races over to scrabble at his pant legs excitedly; Will has to pick him up and set him down in a high drift to keep him from scurrying underfoot. He reaches the shed just as Buster manages to dig his way out, sprinkled with snowflakes like a powdered treat; Will smiles at him before biting off one glove to grope in his pocket for the key to the shed padlock.

A crunch of snow makes him pause.

The sound is loud in the peculiar winter silence, crisp and echoless. Will glances around a few times before deciding one of his dogs is likely stepping on the ice patches crusting the yard, crushing it under their weight as they nose at their glassy reflection. Shrugging, Will fits the key into the mouth of the padlock and turns it.

There’s another crunch, closer.

His shoulders come up against his will. He doesn’t let himself turn around, however, instead pocketing the lock and kicking snow away from the shed doors so he can tug one open, its hinges squealing in the cold.

The crunching comes again, this time in a march toward the shed like footsteps.

Will glances over his shoulder, half-expecting to find someone crossing his yard. There’s no one there, just the long swath of white bleaching the boundary between his property and the field bordering his house. He notices then that his dogs are nowhere in sight.

The crunching comes nearer. The hairs on Will’s arms raise beneath his coat. He licks his lips, wetting them so he can whistle to bring his pack to him, but his throat closes up around the noise.

The crunching stops in front of him.

Will realizes he’s holding his breath.

Something touches his hand.

He rears back violently, crying out. At his side, Winston flinches at the noise. 

“Christ,” Will gasps at the sight of him, one short, sharp sound punched out of him by surprise. His heart is thudding in his chest. Winston whines and creeps forward to slot his muzzle under Will’s sweaty palm, plaintive and apologetic.

There is no more crunching. Sweat beading on the back of his neck, Will looks back at the trail of Winston’s paw prints behind him, and then forward at the pristine stretch of snow before him. He feels ill.

Something touches his other hand. Will slides his eyes over to the bloody dog pushing its big maw into his touch; it looks up at him with its empty eyes, unperturbed.

At length Will’s pulse slows. He drags in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, feeling suddenly hot in his coat and remaining glove. His dogs wait patiently beside him while he digs the padlock out of his pocket and re-snaps it onto the shed doors, no longer in the mood to play handyman; they walk him back to the front porch where he clears his throat and calls hoarsely for the rest of the pack.

When everyone is inside, Will closes his screen and front doors with force. He rests his hot forehead on the doorframe and tells himself firmly that he’s too easily spooked, that he and his dogs are the only ones around, that if there’s a noise in the quarter-mile radius around his little farmhouse it’s either his dogs or him. 

Before he pulls away to tear off his coat and sweater, however, he slides the locks home.

=

Will stands at the counter behind the butcher block island in Hannibal’s kitchen, pureeing cubes of seeded watermelon at Hannibal’s behest. The food processor is contained and much more elegant than the clunky blender Will has at home, loud as a helicopter on the occasions he uses it to make dog food. He watches the soft pink melon tissue surge inside the processor, the color of blended meat.

Across the kitchen, Hannibal is searing strips of beef. His maroon button-down is pushed back to his elbows, and his apron hides his dark suit pants. Will glances over his shoulder and thinks distantly, _red on yellow kills a fellow, red on black won’t attack._

Hannibal turns around to tip the beef into a strainer in the sink, and when he turns back he catches Will looking. His mouth quirks.

“Finish the lemonade,” he tells Will.

Will faces forward and obeys.

He pours the puree through a sieve into a pitcher of lemon juice, sugar water, and shochu. He grabs the ladle Hannibal set out for him and stirs until the healthy pink of the watermelon pales a little, before lifting the pitcher and carrying it over to the refrigerator.

On the shelves of the fridge are several packs of vacuum-sealed meat. Will pushes them aside to make space for the lemonade.

Behind him, Hannibal says, “Thank you, Will. Now the salad.”

Will goes over to the other side of the stainless steel island where Hannibal put out a big salad bowl. Next to it is a shallow tub of a rice vinegar dressing—Will pours it over the lettuce in the bowl, following instructions and feeling like a kid painting by numbers as he shakes in the crisp slices of red radish and cucumber that Hannibal cut beforehand.

Hannibal sets the beef aside in another bowl and comes over to supervise. He steps up to Will’s back, chin brushing Will’s shoulder as he watches Will toss the salad. The tension generated in the inch of space separating them screws Will’s spine straight and makes his hands tremble; he anticipates some criticism of his technique, or lack thereof, but Hannibal lets him finish it by himself.

“Good,” Hannibal offers when Will’s done, and the word puffs against the back of Will’s neck hotly. He flushes. Hannibal pushes the salad aside and drags his cutting board over. On it is an Asian pear and a fruit knife.

“Pick up the knife,” Hannibal says. Will picks it up. He startles when he feels Hannibal lay a hand atop his. He weaves their other hands together and grabs the pear.

“First it must be halved,” he announces, and squeezes Will’s fingers to bring the knife down through the top of the fruit. The blade bites through the pear flesh with little effort, and the halves fall open on the cutting board, the insides white in the kitchen lighting, the scent of them syrupy sweet.

Hannibal steers him into picking one up and sets the knife to the seed divots. “Then it must be cored,” he says, and starts to carve. Will keeps his hand utterly limp, wary of sabotaging Hannibal’s precise cuts for fear that he’ll accidentally twitch the blade through their fingers.

The core falls out in a perfect semi-sphere, as though excavated by a proper melon baller. They repeat the process with the other pear half; Will has to concentrate to keep his trembling from ruining the impeccable shape. He sucks in an abrupt breath as Hannibal flicks the stem out with the tip of the knife, quick as a blink. 

The pear halves look curiously vaginal, dripping from their empty cores down the canal where the stem was. Will looks at the juice making Hannibal’s fingers slick and has to close his eyes.

Hannibal takes a step forward and presses them together from shoulders to knees. “Pay attention,” he chastises, and Will opens his eyes. “We’ll leave the skin on.” His lips brush the nape of Will’s neck this time; his long inhale is obvious. Will flushes harder.

They slice the pears almost paper-thin, Hannibal passing the knife perilously close to the tips of Will’s fingers but never once nicking them. When they’re finished they have a long row of pear slivers marching across the cutting board. Hannibal relinquishes Will’s hands but doesn’t move away as he gathers the pears and dumps them into the salad.

Then he puts his sticky hands on Will’s waist and demands, “Again.”

The knife clatters to the island top as Will reaches out to toss the salad one more time. Hannibal drags the meat over and shakes the beef out on top. The scent that rises from the steak salad is heavy with sesame and soy sauce, but the sweetness of the pears remains apparent.

“Good,” Hannibal repeats.

The tension drains out of Will suddenly and he sags, slumping back into Hannibal’s chest. He grunts, surprised and hurt, when Hannibal opens his mouth and sinks his teeth hard into Will’s neck, right where the first knob of his spine protrudes. 

In a flash he’s transported back several weeks and several miles into the woods. His muscles go slack to the point of lethargy; he remains upright only because he’s pinned against the metal island. Hannibal retracts the bite in the next moment but the pain and imprint don’t immediately fade.

They eat the lunch in the dining room, Hannibal distributing the salad onto plates while Will retrieves and pours the lemonade. Will takes his usual seat at the right of the head but Hannibal sits down directly in front of him, easily switching his fork to his left hand and using his right to hold Will’s wrist across the table as they eat.

The lethargy persists through lunch, all the way up until Hannibal escorts Will to the door and helps him into his coat. Will lets Hannibal bundle him up, absently watching his clever fingers on the zippers and buttons, frowning at his own hebetude.

Hannibal gives him an open-mouth smile as he bumps him gently out the door. Will stares at his teeth and, absurdly, wonders if he’s venomous.

=

Jack is waiting at the farmhouse when Will gets back from the grocery store, leaning on the driver’s door of his SUV. His head is tilted back to let the brittle sunlight slant under the brim of his hat and fall across his lax expression, the lines at his brow conspicuously absent. When Will kills the engine and extricates himself from his seatbelt, however, the pacific look on Jack’s face furrows into something grim.

Will can guess what he’s here for. “Chauffeur service?”

Jack snorts. “If you’d answer your phone every once in a while, the Bureau wouldn’t be riding my ass about gas.” 

The corner of Will’s mouth twitches. He gestures toward his trunk, packed with plastic store bags. “Give me twenty minutes.”

“You have fifteen,” Jack says, but he rounds the side of Will’s car with him and tucks his phone and keys into his pockets to free his hands.

Together they get the groceries inside in under ten minutes. Jack hooks a truly staggering amount of bags over his arms, leaving Will to carry in the delicates. The dogs greet Jack with a chorus of barks—against the rules, Will reminds them—and he returns their enthusiasm in a voice that fills up Will’s little house.

Jack ends up putting things away for him, instructing Will to pack up for a few hours in Bethesda. Will squeezes around him to quickly wash the dishes in the sink, wary of gnats, before refilling his dogs’ food and water while they enjoy a romp in the yard. In the corner of his eye he watches Jack figure out his cabinets and stock them with economic efficiency, his big bear hands surprisingly careful with the bruise-able fruit. Will realizes Jack must have taken over grocery duties in his own home. He keeps that insight to himself.

They leave after Will rounds up his pack and sweeps them back inside, apologizing for treating them like inmates and promising a round of treats when he returns. They lick his hands; he feels forgiven. Jack waits in the SUV and doesn’t tell him to hurry up.

They only narrowly avoid traffic on the way to the crime scene, managing to reach Bethesda in a little over half an hour. Jack navigates them through an extravagant neighborhood with manicured lawns and houses like three of Will’s put together, eventually turning down a street clogged with police managing a crowd of irate home owners. They seem to be protesting the gaudy, indiscreet yellow tape quarantining the last house on the block.

Jack flashes his badge and a frazzled officer lets them through the barricade. Will studies the house as they walk up the long driveway—a colonial Georgian brick beast, more gaudy than historic. The hedges are shaped. Will tries not formulate a premature opinion of the owners. It’s difficult.

The vans of the FBI’s forensics team come presently into view. Before they reach the other agents, Jack leans in to murmur, “Police didn’t want this one. Brace yourself.”

“Braced,” Will says. Jack gives him a look but they’re already at the front door.

Will takes a breath and steps inside.

The house is just as ostentatious on the inside as it is without. There’s a short foyer with skinny Doric columns holding up the faux balcony, immediately succeeded by a salon paneled with doors to different rooms and a big staircase leading to a furnished landing. The art crowded on the walls, mostly reproduction Revolutionary War portraits, is expensive but unimpressive. It’s all very overdone. 

There are some other agents milling around the house, cataloguing belongings and photographing the entryway and exits. Will is suddenly over-warm in the midst of them; he snatches off his hat and unzips his coat and doesn’t feel much better.

“Bodies are upstairs,” Jack informs him. He has a hand on the ornate banister, one foot on the bottom stair.

Will is nowhere near as eager. “Alright.” There’s a headache already trying to rise up through his skull—he gropes at a pocket for some pills, realizes he left his aspirin at home, and concentrates on forcing the throbbing back until he feels something like ready. Then he moves to follow.

He climbs the first step and is immediately assaulted with a violent stench like spoiled eggs. 

It hits him right in the gut. The reek is so bad he gags, forced to bring a hand up to cover his mouth, afraid he’s going to lose his meagre lunch all over the victims’ hardwood flooring. His eyes water at the acidic burn of bile in the very back of his mouth and he has to blink back reflexive tears.

The agents in the vicinity carry on fingerprinting and clicking their cameras, unperturbed. No one else reacts. When he looks up, he finds Jack frowning down at him. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks, curt in his concern.

Will stares at him. “You don’t smell that?” It’s impossible not to—Will can feel the smell settling on his skin and clogging his pores.

Jack’s scowl softens into something a little more blatant. “Smell what?”

Will waits several beats, but it becomes apparent that Jack is being serious. He sees then that the moment can proceed in one of two ways. He chooses the way that doesn’t involve Jack pulling him aside to question whether or not he needs to hand Will off to a different kind of professional.

He makes himself take a deep breath, deliberately dragging in air through his nose. The rotten stench rolls down his tongue and swishes in his lungs like swill. For a tense moment he thinks it’s over and he’s going to puke all down his front.

Then the scent abruptly vanishes. 

Will takes another breath. This one is clean—no stomach-churning fumes, just the faint smell of sterile equipment and full-body scrubs. The nausea recedes.

He has just enough time to wonder if he’s having some kind of episode before Jack descends a few steps and says sharply, “Will?”

“Sorry,” Will says, shoulders coming up. “I’m sensitive, I guess.” He feels even hotter; he shrugs out of his coat and folds it over his arm to give himself somewhere to look as he climbs up to the same stair as Jack.

Jack’s gaze falls on him like a weight. Will knows the _are you alright for this_ is coming, so he forestalls it by muttering, “Which room?”

There’s a long pause before Jack answers, but he answers. “This way.”

They pass the landing with its overstuffed armchairs and end tables and go on down the hall where a small throng of agents are waiting impatiently outside the last bedroom door. Price and Zeller are among them, griping, inexplicably, about Purcellian opera. Beverly is elsewhere, getting her cast removed and downgraded to a wrist wrap. The agents part to let Will through.

“Braced?” Jack asks one more time, snapping on a glove and leaning forward to grab doorknob.

Will nods. “Braced.”

Jack opens the door.

=

Will makes the drive to the interstate diner while the sky is still a dark bruise healing to yellow in the east. He’s shivering a little even though his dysfunctional heater is blasting at its permanent _HIGH—_ he hasn’t stopped since he shuddered awake from a hazy nightmare and had to strip off his soaked shirt and underwear. His skin is clammy; he thinks he might have some kind of bug.

By the time he exits into the parking lot between the gas station and motel, the sun has risen a bit and there are more trucks on the road. Many of them exit with him. Will tugs on his coat with trembling fingers and, climbing out of his car, prepares himself for a full house.

On any given morning it’s usually just him and a handful of drivers bent over their gritty coffees waiting for a meal to keep their bellies hot for a while. Today Will finds his corner booth taken and has to settle for a table near the door where a blustery wind blows in every time someone walks in. He’s just exhausted enough to be irritated about it.

It takes a while for the waitress to come around to him. When she does, her smile is strained—her mascara is smudged under one age-creased eye and she’s radiating stress like a reactor. She calls him by name as she always does but sounds tired when she asks if he wants the usual.

Will says _yes, please_ and doesn’t fuss. She takes a second look at him and mentions with sympathy that he looks mighty under the weather, promising to get a cup to him quick as she can. She hurries away before Will can tell her not to trouble herself.

Alone, he folds his arms on the table and puts his head down on them. His sweaty forehead streaks the nylon sleeves. Now he feels too warm, even with the outside air gusting across the damp nape of his neck every few minutes. His skull starts to feel tight, like there’s too much inside. He definitely has a bug.

It doesn’t help that he’s been thinking about Bethesda since Jack delivered him back to Wolf Trap, memories of the scene like photographs crowding the morbid museum of his mind. When he closes his eyes, he can still see the bedroom, burned on the back of his eyelids: blood soaking the carpet like a wet rug, dripping from the mattress where a husband and wife lie entwined in a final marital embrace. The headache he felt then, exacerbated by the smelted-copper scent thick in the room, never fully left.

Jack had scrutinized his face after he examined the scene, greedy, Will knew, for a very specific diagnosis. Someone else might have given it to him—the couple was tied up missionary with razor wire,  bellies sliced open to let their guts mingle like their genitalia (minus a few organs, according to Zeller), a gruesome tableau like so many they’d seen before. But Will had seen it and known. There was skill to the murder, sadism joined with ability, but he’d known. Virtuosic though it was, the scene was not beautiful—it was trite, overwrought, unoriginal. It was vulgar. 

It was not the Ripper.

Nevertheless, it won’t leave his mind.

A bit of noise starts up across the diner. Will raises his head to look. The man sitting at his corner table is holding up the waitress—Will can’t hear the particulars of what he’s saying but he can tell by the look on the waitress’ face that it’s nothing impressive. The man hands her his menu but doesn’t let go, leering and trying to tug her forward with it. She snatches it back without amusement and turns to leave.

He reaches forward to slap her ass as she goes.

For a single moment all the pressure in Will’s head dissipates and he has a clear thought: that man should be dead.

The slap that the waitress gives him in return is loud to make heads turn, as is her dismissal. She informs him that she’s retrieving the owner and that he can let himself out if he doesn’t want to be thrown out. Then she disappears through swinging door to the kitchens. 

Some of the truckers around the diner are on their feet, stalled in their intention to converge on the corner table. Will realizes he too is halfway out of his seat. He lowers back down when he sees the man gathering his things and stalking to the door, hissing something very unflattering as he goes. 

A few of the truckers watch him make his way out. Will knows intuitively that they’re committing his face to memory. He keeps his head deliberately bowed, the tightness in his skull returning magnified as a headache. The wind let in by the man’s departure blows shockingly cold across his damp skin.

Eventually the waitress returns from the kitchens, her makeup in order and her face only slightly less thunderous. She makes her circuit around the diner with grace, stopping by Will’s table to pour his grainy coffee and set down his French toast special. 

Before he can stop himself, Will murmurs an apology for the man. She gives him a patient look and assures him she was fine on her own, but some of the storm in her brow dissipates and her expression eases toward fondness. She leaves him with a pat on the shoulder and the gracious allowance of _you get ‘im next time_.

Will drinks his coffee to wash down the realization that he’d like to.

=

The chair at the desk in Hannibal’s office is a luxury, dressed in ticking the color of toffee with kiln-dried wood frames and arm rests. It feels like a dream when Will sinks down on it, pressured by the insistent weight of Hannibal’s hand.

“You look unwell,” Hannibal explains. “You should be closer to the fire tonight.”

Out of curiosity Will once looked up the chair’s price—it was something unnecessary and exorbitant, somewhere upward of one grand. He feels bad for leaving his sweat on it as he goes limp on the cushion and lets his damp head fall back.

“Special treatment, Dr. Lecter?” he asks, tired and wry. “Or do you give all your sick patients time on the throne?”

“Special treatment, certainly,” Hannibal replies, rounding the desk to stand opposite Will. “I usually encourage my sick patients to cancel.”

The logs in the hearth at Will’s back crackle and pop as they burn, the blaze built hot to ward off the chill creeping in through the seams of the room. Its orange light dominates the office with the overhead fluorescents dimmed; in the muted hellfire glow Hannibal’s eyes are pinpoints of red. He does nothing to conceal the way he stares at Will.

“Sorry,” Will mutters. It rasps out of his throat, suddenly dry. “I’m probably contagious.” He’d thought the bug would have quit his system by now, but instead he spent the entire week sweating, dizzy and cotton-headed in a way that probably merited a day off for recuperation. “I should have stayed home.”

“That would have been wise,” Hannibal agrees. He shifts minutely to the right, tilting his head one degree. It occurs to Will that Hannibal is memorizing the contrast of him in the firelight. He turns his face away, flustered.

He had, in fact, considered not coming, but not to recuperate. Once upon a time he used to flee straight here to deal with the things that bubble up out of the mire of his black thoughts, like the dreams he’s had every night since the incident at the diner about that man at the corner table—about that crystal moment of clarity in which the only thought in his head was that the man didn’t deserve life. 

It’s many weeks since Hannibal has been a haven, however. For an hour before his appointment Will considered calling Hannibal to cancel, and then calling Jack to confess. 

In the end he came. He always comes.

He knows now that he can’t trust Hannibal with the dark parts of his mind, but habit has him spitting out words anyway. “What do men who harass women deserve?”

The consideration in Hannibal’s eyes shifts from artistic to contemplative. “Punitively speaking?”

Will tries to look at him but his regard is too intense. He nods at the glossy top of the desk.

Hannibal does not immediately speak. He returns to Will’s side at leisure, his stride indolent and rolling like that of a big cat—like a lion. Will has to exercise willpower to stay limp on the chair and not to crane his neck to keep Hannibal in view as he approaches; the hairs on his arms raise at Hannibal’s proximity but he manages. Eventually Hannibal comes to a stop behind Will, perfectly aware of the way Will tenses involuntarily and, if Will had to guess, probably enjoying it. 

“I find violence against women particularly heinous,” he confides. “It pervades our society to the point that men believe they need not be held accountable for it.”

Will flinches at the sudden brush of Hannibal’s hands through his hair. Hannibal waits until his shoulders relax from their hunch before carding his fingers through the damp curls. Will tries to lean away, embarrassed by his sweat, but Hannibal simply adjusts to rub at the shoreline where his hair meets his nape. Will can feel himself starting to melt in his seat, and he frowns, unwilling to be mollified. 

For the first time he broaches what has lain unspoken between them. “You believe in accountability?”

Hannibal pauses. Will is aware that he has vexed him with his ungainly antagonism, so opposite the delicacy with which they had been proceeding. The longer Hannibal’s silence stretches, the more Will wonders if he has genuinely annoyed him, and what he’ll do about it. He betrays himself by tensing.

Hannibal pulls one of his curls, hard.

Will is too shocked to swallow his squawk. Hannibal proceeds to rub generous circles into Will’s scalp, soothing away the sting.

“Accountability is the other face of free will,” he says. “It is, I believe, a defining aspect of human identity.” He drags his short nails across Will’s skin. “Our actions are the only things we can lay claim to in a world we come into and go out of with nothing.” 

Will discovers it is very hard to maintain a scowl while being petted. He tries anyway. 

Hannibal continues, “Every deed we commit is a change we inflict on the small corner of the universe that we inhabit. I find that magnitude of influence breathtaking.” Without warning he fists a hand in Will’s hair, just long enough to make Will gasp. “Powerful.” He lets go and resumes the circles. “The closest we come to godhood. To be accountable, for both the good and the bad that we wreak, is a gift.”

Will snorts and tries to sit up, but Hannibal grips him by the fine down at his hairline to keep him where he is. It hurts. Will grits out, “Being accountable doesn’t equal being above consequences.”

“Of course not,” Hannibal agrees. “Being accountable requires awareness of consequences.” He drops one hand down to cup Will’s chin, lifting until Will is looking up at his inverted image. “I stand by all my decisions,” he tells him, “and I accept the consequences as they come.” His smile looks strange upside-down. “Just as you do.”

Something like shame floods Will. This time when he pulls away, Hannibal lets him. Will recalls all the nights he’s lied awake trying to rationalize the ten bullets in Garret Jacob Hobbs’ cold corpse, and thinks Hannibal gives him too much credit. 

“Do your decisions and their consequences follow you around like ghosts?” he asks, bitter. His head starts to throb; abruptly the warmth from the fire is too much.

Hannibal waits until he’s done dragging the sleeve of his sweater through the sweat beading at his brow before grabbing him gently by the face and pulling him back down. He prods at the grooves of Will’s temples, massaging there like he knows Will is a few minutes away from a headache. Will doesn’t want to unknot for him but he finds himself going limp once again. 

“There is a difference between accountability and guilt, Will,” Hannibal says.

His voice is no louder than the logs popping in the hearth. Will closes his eyes. Hannibal leans down to put his nose close to the crook of Will’s ear, inhaling for several of Will’s heartbeats before letting his breath gust across the join of Will’s neck and shoulder. 

“Of the two,” he says with tenderness, “accountability is much nobler.”

Will doesn’t want Hannibal’s comfort. He feels better nonetheless.

=

It’s late enough that all the dogs are asleep where they lie in a puddle front of the fireplace, curled together to share the narrow warmth put off by the space heater on the stone hearth. Will glances over at them as he peels back his sheets, watching to see if any of them stir at the rasp of fabric. None of the pack moves.

Will shivers. His side of the room is chilly. The tiny draft that creeps in through the crack in the sill at the head of his bed gusts across his bare arms and thighs and raises goosebumps in its wake. It does not make his erection shrink.

He looks down the line of his body and debates on whether or not to do something about it. He’s not yet hard enough for it to be urgent. It’s been a while since he last got off, longer still since he did it himself. He feels, unbelievably, out of practice.

He slides a hand down to pluck at the waistband of his boxer-briefs experimentally. The moment his fingers brush the curls at the base of his cock, his hips buck into the phantom sensation of fingers—surgeon, artist, musician fingers—following the arrow of his obliques past his erection to his hole. For a split second his body recalls the hurt and stretch of being fucked apart; his cock twitches hard.

With the stab of arousal, however, comes an equally sharp pang of guilt. He snatches his hand out of his underwear. The guilt pickles to shame and sours his mouth, making his stomach churn. He remembers why he hasn’t touched himself in weeks.

One of the dogs snuffles and rolls over across the room. Will reaches down to pull his covers back up. The drag of the sheets across his groin gets him squirming, but he makes himself settle. A glance at the clock tells him it’s the dead of night, a silent hour.

He closes his eyes and does not sleep.

=

Will is several minutes late to his afternoon class. He was blindsided by a migraine during his morning lecture and spent the better part of his lunch break in the bathroom, on his knees in front of the toilet wrestling with violent nausea. In the end nothing came up except some thin bile, which burned in the back of his throat for the entire drive to the nearest pharmacy. Replenishing his stock of painkillers took longer than he expected—when he bursts in through his classroom door he finds his students restless from waiting. 

He ends his presentation early as an apology. It’s a filler lecture anyway, an exercise in research and comparison in keeping with the easy pace of the early semester: twenty-five slides containing the details of some 2011 homicides solved with the knowledge of a similar spree from 1998. Though Will is against paper assignments at this level on principle, he collects an in-class analysis from the students to flip through later before dismissing them.

It occurs to Will as he watches them file out that he should have called in sick today. His body feels weak and too tight, like he’s been stuffed into skin a size too small. The department has been giving him dirty looks for the time he’s missed since Jack started calling him out to the field, but he thinks Dr. Orozco wouldn’t have minded covering for one class.

He waits until the room is empty before dropping into his desk chair and dragging his hands down his face, head starting to pound again. Whatever he has, it’s tenacious. Will is lax about getting regular check-ups—a residual habit from a childhood too poor and nomadic for doctor visits—but he can admit that it’s time he saw someone.

Behind him, the granulated scans of some old police photos waver on the wall where the heating unit makes the projection screen billow. When Will glances over his shoulder, the filmy eyes of a brutalized corpse stare fuzzily back at him. 

For a moment he sees the man at the diner in the place of the victim, his body savaged and that leer petrified on his ugly, pallid face. He looks like he does in Will’s dreams, mutilated in slaughter, and for a split second Will feels like he does in his dreams—righteous and satisfied and _glad_. Then the leer collapses back into the glassy-eyed expression of a victim decades dead and Will has to look away.

He has no more classes today—he can leave. Some days he stays in his classroom to work and some days he goes to his closet of an office, but today he thinks he’ll go home. He needs sleep and a stiff drink to lay him out for a while. It might not cure him but hell if it won’t make him feel better.

He reaches across the desk to close his presentation; the corpse disappears. When he unplugs his computer from the projector, the crime scene photos on the wall cut to sterile electronic blue. Inexplicably, his burgeoning headache intensifies.

Will frowns. He leans forward for the projector remote and clicks it off.

As the screen blinks out, something touches his foot.

Will’s chair clatters to the floor as he shoots upright, jerking back from the desk. His eyes dart to the underside, scanning the tangle of power cords on the floor, skin prickling at the phantom sensation of something nudging his shoe.

There’s nothing there.

He stares for a few loud heartbeats, pulse still thudding from surprise. Then he takes a few steps around the desk, circling slowly, inspecting the space underneath. He frowns when he finds no sign of anything.

He’s debating whether or not it’s worth the trouble to call maintenance and report some sort of critter when the door to his classroom opens and Alana walks in.

“Thought you might have left,” she tells him as she approaches the desk. “I’m glad I caught you.”

Will turns around to right his chair as discreetly as possible before she reaches him. “I was on my way out,” he shrugs.

Alana props her hip up on the edge of the desk. “I’ll only hold you up for a minute.”

She leans forward to give him one of her psychiatrist smiles, the one she specifically crafted to be both direct and nonthreatening; her hair swings forward and from it the scent of generic body wash, not her usual almond extract perfume, wafts across the air between them. 

Pretty as it is, Will has never been a fan of that smile. He is more catty than he intends when he says, “You changed your soap.” 

“Good nose.” Alana’s eyebrows go up but she regains her footing and parries without missing a beat. “That’s why I’m here, actually.”

It takes Will a moment to puzzle out her meaning. Then he remembers: Bethesda. He grunts and drops his eyes as he reaches down to start packing up his computer and his students’ analyses. “You ever get tired of being Jack’s emissary?”

“All the time,” Alana admits baldly, “but my concern is my own.” She exchanges her smile for something more genuine, something put out and tired. Will relaxes a little. “I just want to know if you’re feeling alright.”

Will is aware of the film of sweat across his forehead and the sickly pallor of his face. “I’m making an appointment for a checkup tonight.”

Alana looks pleased, as he knew she would. “I think that’ll be good for you.” She stands up. “I know you hate interrogations. Thanks for indulging me.”

Will feels bad that he’s glad for the quick goodbye. “Thanks for asking. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Please do,” she says, and leaves. Will waits to wipe his arm across his forehead until she’s gone.

It doesn’t take long for him to finish gathering his things and don his coat and bag. He makes sure he has his phone and keys before walking to the exit where he clicks off most of the classroom lights, leaving one on for the janitor. It feels strange to be leaving so early but his throat is starting to feel sore and he wants that drink now more than ever.

He pauses halfway through the door to look back at the floor around his desk one last time. There’s nothing.

He turns away and shuts the door behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> I also exist at [t-pock.tumblr.com.](http://t-pock.tumblr.com/) Feel free to buy me a [coffee!](https://ko-fi.com/A3784JR1)


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